In a February Mood

There comes a point, after weeks of ungodly dark and dreary days, unbroken by any hint of sun or warmth, when one's own company wears thin.

It takes a lot to break me down, probably because I now have something concrete against which to measure any sadness, especially the slight, niggling sadness brought by dismal weather. So what. It's gray for months on end. My friend Hank said that bad weather looks worse when you're looking out the window. Get out in it. It takes a surprising amount of fortitude to go out, looking for adventure, when the light is as flat and dull as a mall parking lot.

But we do go out. We have to put some miles on the dog, and on me. I decided to follow my nose and pick a road I'd never been down (or, in this case, up). 

It's not hard to find those around here. 

To get there, we walked past this old jewel, moldering in an overgrown field. I've paid several visits to this house, but they've been in summer. I like to poke around abandoned places to see what denizens of their gardens have survived the neglect.

You can't kill a ditch lily, even if you try. Ah, this was a beautiful day at the old place, a not-February day. I had fun snooping around the foundation and outbuildings. Just the reflection of a blue sky in the window cheers me.

But now we are here in February, in the weeks before the woodcocks get back, and this is what we get: gray and brown and wet and not much else. Living here, I realized as I gazed at it this evening, would have been problematic even when the place was tended. Whipple Run lies between the house and the road, so you have to ford it to get out, and ford it again to get home. Not a big deal now, but let it rain torrents for a few days, and you've got a situation on your hands. 

Water will do what it will. It seeks the lowest point. Thus, what was once a driveway is now a streambed. We have a way of inviting water down our paths. We grade them until they're lower than the surrounding land, and water will always oblige us,  running in to take the low road. 

My boots were not up to the fording, so we walked on. 

Mood:

Ah, February, you old, cold, wet blanket. Are you trying to outdo your nasty sister January? 

I wonder what's up this road? 

First there was a pool with a nice sandbar, a little oxbow backwater. I scanned the muddy trunk of the drowning tree and found what I was looking for: mustelid tracks.

Hoping for otter, I settled for mink. Mink will do.

A light rain pattered on the surface of the water. We pressed on anyway.

Turns out there wasn't much up this road but woods, which was fine with us.

When I got to the top of the hill some messages came in on my phone. 

 Phoebe had rented a little smart car on La Gomera for the weekend and done some exploring. While I trudged down a muddy road in Appalachia, gazing at a house bound only for rot and ruin, she had made a pilgrimage to find a wee chapel she'd once spotted from far below. 

She was not disappointed. There it stood, sharp as an amethyst in the clear Atlantic sunshine.

And the climb up there had looked like this. Oh, what I'd have given to take that hike with her!

And she and Oscar had ended the day like this:

Oh, to be young and in love. 

I'll take middle-aged and still alive, with everything more or less still functional, because it's what I've got.

What is it that keeps us in place? Why do I choose to live in a place that weeps all winter long? Why does my daughter choose to live in the sunstruck glow of a rocky island, the sea all around her? That second question needs no answer.

Why does it not occur to me to leave, to strike out for someplace new?

I search for answers, and find I don't want to leave here. I'm scratching and clawing away at my house, throwing out what I don't need (nearly everything); trying to get it back in repair, so I can stop worrying about the rot and malfunction of it all, and enjoy it instead. It's a goal. The old furnace seems to need about a grand a year just to keep running; I've replaced everything you could replace on that damn thing.  I'm having new siding put on the tower, rooting out the wall rot on the north side (and wherever else it comes up.) Braced for the worst.

 I love working in my studio, starting new projects, watching for my old jay friends, and dreaming of seedlings coming up in only a couple more months. And then it will be garden time, and there's no place I'd rather be in garden time. And just as it's garden time, I'll take off on a book tour (see left sidebar of this blog). So there are things to look forward to, and boy do I look forward to them.

I'm choosing to vary my life with travel, to give myself enough outings to counter the sameness of remaining in place. I feel the press of time, the impermanence of my stay on this earth.  I have become one of those women who travel more, because they suddenly can. But I also travel more because I need to. I get so much more out of it than ever before. 

I'm trying to be kinder to myself, knowing that I'm still grieving. Something like this doesn't go away in a year. It becomes part of you, and it colors your outlook, not necessarily in a bad way all the time. It makes you grateful to be here. It makes you so happy to feel joy again, when it happens. It makes you expect less of life, having seen how easily it can be grabbed away. So when something good happens, you're just bowled over that it was so good. And when bad things happen, you measure them against the mother of all bad things, and they don't look that bad to you. Still, you're always looking over your shoulder, and I don't expect that to change. You have to keep an eye on something that big.

As the anniversaries, big and small, portentious and life-changing and merely depressing, parade by in my psyche, I find myself walking over to gaze at the house where Bill lived for a short time, where he grilled and laughed and played music, then suffered and died, finally leaving the suffering, and us, behind.

 I don't know what I expect to find by going over there. There's nothing I'll get from it but little  shards of memories, the sharp ones that dig in. There's no one to tell me I should stay away, so when I'm drawn there, I go. The place seems so much smaller, so diminished, without him in it. And he's not there. I sense nothing of him there. 

But I keep going. I guess I'm looking for a connection, the same one I'm looking for when I walk to his grave each morning. What doesn't seem right to me is that there should be nothing of him left here. The kids struggle with that, too, that feeling of being left alone. He had such a big soul, such a huge appetite for life, that it seems there should be a trace of that still around. Seems like he should be tossing the treetops on a still, wet day.

 Nothing moves, and not a bird sings. 

Late August Garden Tour

I was feeling kind of melancholy this evening. I'd taken Phoebe to the plane two days earlier, and it was really hitting me how alone I'd be while Liam was at school this fall. I ached for my girleen, so far away, and I had that dratted autumnal lump in my throat. Listening to too much Jackson Browne, too. I love his music but jeez. The slow crickets in the meadow are his insectile equivalent.

So I put my big rig on and grabbed the iPhone and went out to shoot some goldenrod and ironweed. I highly recommend clicking on the panoramas to get a better effect. Bill has mowed the meadow twice this season, trying to beat back the forest of sumac and honeysuckle, and the goldenrod has responded most enthusiastically! This meadow is so beautiful in the dying light I almost can't look at it without tearing up.

I never tire of shooting the flowers that I've happened to plant in the corner of the front bed. I have years and years of this shot. This time, Salvia guaranitica "Black and Blue," a random tuberose, Mexican cuphea or firecracker plant, zinnas...

Just below that bed, more zinnias, and an opportunistic tall ironweed that looks pretty swell with their party colors.

From there I wandered to the shade garden under the birches. And realized that I have kind of a thing for fuchsias. Gartenmeister "Bonstedt" in bronze and variegated, a little pink and purple one whose name escapes me.

The pink one: Fuchsia Trandshen Bonstedt

The hummingbird beds, full of cardinalflower exploding.  Oh Hell yeah!

More Salvia "Black and Blue" and cuphea here, too. 

'Round the west side, zinnias and Caryopteris "Bluebeard." Both big faves of butterflies, which seem in rather short supply this summer. Come on, people, I have the flowers! 

The newest crop of seedling gray birches I've grown from seeds from our existing trees. 

Believe it or not, that white trunk shard is all that remains of Garret the red-headed woodpecker's home.

I have a stone propped up that says "Tempus fugit" here.

 I wandered around back to shudder at the giant kiwi vine, which has maybe three fruits still hanging after it aborted the crop thanks to a midsummer drought. Sigh. That's a lot of biomass for three kiwi fruits.

Speaking of biomass, here's the willow we planted when I was big with Liam, 16 years ago.

I waited and waited for the first batch of morning glories I planted to germinate. Nada. Wasted three weeks. Went out and bought a new packet of "Heavenly Blue" and they all came up. But by then it was nearly July!

It's gonna kill me to see frost get these plants. 

I hope they get a full mantle of blossoms before that happens. 

Hope is what gardening is all about, after all.

I felt better when I came inside, having at least recorded and saved images of some of the extravagant beauty all around me. I realized that I made most of it happen, and that made me feel a bit better. Of course, the beauty that happens on its own is the best of all.